S0WE25 - The Call

"The Call" is the twenty-fifth episode of the W-Series and its fifth epic. It runs in real time across a single Saturday evening: at 7pm the weather-wall grid reads a catastrophic energy build-up under Reptile Ravine and projects every station in the city failing inside the hour, and Luther, who wrote the response plan, is collected off a restaurant patio with his pack and put in the chair at the Crisis Coordination Center. Nick, Judy and Pawbert watch from three folding chairs against the back wall.

Synopsis

The grid's annual deep pass on Reptile Ravine, the first the restored station has had, comes back with a reading beyond anything the grid has recorded, and the Crisis Coordination Center goes red with a projected release window inside the hour. Deputy Unit Chief Yassir puts the room on its highest footing with the Unit Chief's chair empty, gets silence from the station on the radio and voicemail on every phone, and sends a Counter-Terrorism Unit element to look. Costa locates Luther's phone on a restaurant patio in Savanna Central and pulls the whole pack in with him. Luther runs the playbook he wrote: the mayor goes underground, first responders go to protected positions, trains stop at their next stations, the sky clears, districts are triaged, and a shelter-in-place alert reaches every phone in the city under a two-key ceremony. Station 118 sits in a bunker with no reason attached to the order, Maddie hears the reason on a channel she cannot repeat, Elizabeth McHerd declines her seat in the bunker to stay at her family's table, and Nick is arrested inside the room for calling his mother. With the release window closed to two minutes, Luther calls for demolition charges under Tundratown's boundary station to cut the trunk line, and the mayor authorizes it. As two agents hold brass keys, Pawbert takes his phone from a security lockbox and calls Gary De'Snake, who is at dinner with the Reptile Ravine chief engineer; the plant, read off its own instruments, is sitting at rest. O'Brian pulls the raw feed, finds a translator wrapping a tiny number to the top of its scale, and shouts the hold. Luther aborts at two. The city never learns anything happened. The pack drives to Luther's parents' house, and then home to four green mugs after midnight.

Plot

Every Saturday evening the grid asks its sixty-seven stations how they are, and once a year it makes one station read its own sensors instead of answering from file. Tonight the deep pass falls to Reptile Ravine, restored to the grid just over a year ago and never asked before. Deep under the district sits the machine Agnes De'Snake built, which is both the sealed control chamber the city concreted over after the Icener crisis and the plant every weather wall draws on, wired to the modern grid through a translator that converts her units into the grid's. At 7pm the translator hands the grid a value beyond anything a station has recorded, the model reads energy piling up under the Ravine and releasing into the trunk lines that feed every station in turn, and the holographic map in the Crisis Coordination Center goes red. At the monitoring desk Stiles looks up from a crossword with seven across unfilled.

Across Savanna Central the pack is at Via Napoli, where Nick is arguing that crostini deserves separate billing from bread and Pawbert has just found the wood-fired funghi back on the board. In the CCC, Deputy Unit Chief Yassir declares Condition RED with the Unit Chief's chair empty, since Buchanan is at Copenhoofen commissioning the backup site. She has the monitoring desk call the station by radio and gets nothing back, calls its three phone lines and gets voicemail, and sends a CTU element to look at the building. Costa, watching her start to fray, has Luther's phone located face-down on a restaurant table and calls him with the scenario code. Luther refuses to come alone. Three unmarked vehicles take all four of them off the patio in front of their bread, and Luther's keys go into an agent's paw on the way to the car.

Costa gives Luther the operations chair and puts the other three in folding chairs against the back wall with orders to touch nothing. Luther opens the binder he wrote and starts running it. The mayor goes down to the hardened level under City Hall, essential personnel are collected out of their evenings, and Signal CRIMSON goes out to every precinct and agency, ninety-nine precincts answering in turn. Trains run to their next stations and stop. Zootopia Approach declares ATC ZERO and clears its own sky, because the boundary between two walled climates throws windshear and sixty-seven boundaries failing at once would put it everywhere. The harbor closes. On the map the blue and red dots of the city's responders pull back into garages and bunkers while a white line above it, the projected release window, narrows from both ends.

At Station 118 the tones interrupt a call the engine was about to roll on. Chimney gets an order to take his crew to protected positions with nothing behind it and follows it, and five firefighters go into a basement bunker with a radio and their beacons, Ravi Panikkar, the newest of them, half a step behind. Maddie, patched into the operations channel at dispatch, can hear everything the bunker cannot and say none of it to her husband. Elizabeth McHerd, at dinner with her family, calls three neighboring city-states from a restaurant hallway, declines the seat an escort agent has come to put her in, hands the watch to her deputy, and goes back to the table to eat dessert. On the video wall the mayor appears with his tie loosened, Buchanan hands Luther the floor, and Chief Bogo sees his two detectives sitting where they have no business being and files the conversation for later.

Luther triages the districts on the radio: Tundratown first, since the trunk surfaces there at Station One on the Sahara boundary; Sahara Square, the Rainforest District, and then Little Rodentia, where the lift tier he wrote for four hundred thousand small mammals assumes hours and the model gives minutes, so the order is shelter in place. Four Precinct 7 units have acknowledged the relocation and stayed forward at Fog and Moss, where Nolan is talking a barricaded subject away from a victim; Grey tells the CCC he is not leaving her in there, and Luther grants the exception under his own name. The CTU team breaches an empty station whose alarm panel is screaming the same number the CCC has been staring at, which the room takes as the fourth confirmation. In the chairs, Pawbert looks for the prison on the map and finds a blank.

Costa opens the question of the public alert. Luther argues against sending it, on a stampede model that weights panic by species; Nick asks who decided that eight and a half million mammals should be kept in the dark; Judy finds a third answer, an advisory to stay home and hold your family rather than an order to run; Pawbert says the mammals themselves would want to choose. Costa takes Judy's language and defers the send until the continuity steps are done. Nick leaves his chair, locks himself in a bathroom, and calls Vivian to hear her voice. She talks about the garden and the early tomatoes. Two ZSI agents find him mid-call and walk him back across the floor in restraints, and Luther, who has the authority to stop it, turns back to his display. Judy sees why he does it, and it does not help.

The alert goes out at 7:36 under Two-Person Integrity, two agents at consoles on opposite walls reading each item back over a hardwired channel and turning brass keys on a mark, with Costa speaking his authorization code into the readback. Every phone in the city buzzes with an advisory that says almost nothing. In the bunker Hen reaches her wife, Eddie reaches his grown son in a nightclub too loud to hear him and sends a message that sits undelivered on his phone, Buck has nobody to dial, and Athena, fallen back to the same bunker, gets as far as her children's names and puts the phone away. Maddie answers a call she is forbidden to answer and promises a daughter that help will come. On Deersborough Island a ferry-terminal manager sends two hundred stranded passengers to hot cocoa. Stiles explains why nobody can shut the station down: the controls Agnes built are down in the sealed chamber beneath the lighthouse, poured over in concrete when the district was restored, so the surface station is only a readout. O'Brian, called in off shift, opens a second window into the plant's own diagnostic line without being asked.

At 7:52 the white line has stopped moving. Luther calls for structural severance, sequenced demolition charges under Station One, to sever the trunk ahead of the release and leave the rest of the city standing, with the half million mammals living over the junction inside the blast zone. Yassir asks why not cut at the Ravine itself, and Luther answers in front of the whole wall that there is no charge under the concrete over the Root, the one chamber the city swore never to open again. The mayor authorizes it and speaks his code. The readback runs. Pawbert, hearing that the whole case against the station amounts to unanswered phones and an empty chair, and knowing that district is Gary's, asks Judy for thirty seconds. Judy stands and erupts at the security station about her husband, loud enough to turn every head in the room, and behind her Pawbert takes his phone out of the lockbox and calls Gary De'Snake, who is at dinner with the Reptile Ravine chief engineer. The engineer checks Agnes's original instruments off his own line into the plant, and reports it sitting at rest, same as it was at lunch. One of the two agents asks to hear the authorization code again. Pawbert walks up the floor with the call open and tells Luther. Luther orders O'Brian to read the raw feed. Two readouts sit side by side on her monitor, one small and one enormous, and she shouts the hold from the Lower Ring as the count reaches two. Luther aborts.

The walls are fine. O'Brian explains that the resting plant reads so far below the grid's floor that the value wrapped from the bottom of the scale to its top; the station's own panel had been echoing the same wrapped value. The map goes green, the stand-down cascades back through the same voices that answered CRIMSON, McHerd unmakes her three calls from the same hallway, a corrective alert lifts an advisory most of the city experienced as twenty strange minutes, and Stiles fills in the crossword. Luther leaves the white line on the wall so the room can watch eight o'clock arrive and become an ordinary time. Nick walks out of the side room, asks whether the city was dying and whether it still is, and is told it isn't, because Pawbert made a phone call. At the Ravine station the night operator, Dewey, walks up the path with popcorn from a movie to find ZSI vehicles on the pad and a chief engineer who asks where he was.

ZSI returns the sedan. Luther drives past the turn for home and keeps going, and on the drive he apologizes to Judy for letting Nick be walked past him and for saying nothing when she shouted him down, and says the worse thing is that they were in that room because he put them there. Judy tells him she meant every word and that he owes her nothing. Nick files an apology for a call he says he would make again, and Luther answers that Nick called his mother while he spent the hour not calling his own, with her address inside the exposure zone on his own display. The sedan turns onto Kilimanjaro Parkway. Maris opens the door, says her son's name, and holds him while his paws shake; Harlan calls it a welcome surprise and means it, and they are put in the kitchen for tea Luther does not drink. After midnight the four of them are home. Pawbert brings the mugs down in their order and lays the green sweater over the chair that faces the door, tells them to put the night down because it will still be there in the morning and smaller, and Luther turns from a dark window with hours to go before it lightens.

Key Moments

• The deep pass on Reptile Ravine comes back with a reading beyond anything the grid has recorded, and the Crisis Coordination Center goes red
• Yassir gets silence from the station on the radio and voicemail on every phone, and sends CTU to look at the building
• Three unmarked vehicles collect the pack off the Via Napoli patio in front of their bread
• Luther runs the playbook he wrote from a chair he once refused, with his pack in folding chairs behind him
• Station 118 goes underground on an order with no reason attached, and Maddie hears the reason on a channel she cannot repeat
• McHerd declines the seat in the bunker and goes back to her family's table to eat dessert
• The alert debate: Luther's stampede model, Nick's truth, Judy's shelter-in-place reframe, and Pawbert asking what the mammals themselves would want
• Nick calls his mother from a bathroom and is walked back across the floor in restraints while Luther turns back to his display
• The shelter-in-place alert fires under two brass keys, and in the bunker the crew reach for their families
• Luther calls for demolition charges under Tundratown's boundary station, and the mayor authorizes it
• Judy erupts at the security station as cover while Pawbert takes his phone from the lockbox and calls Gary De'Snake
• O'Brian pulls the raw feed, finds the translator wrapping a resting plant to the top of its scale, and shouts the hold
• Luther aborts the count at two, and leaves the projected-release line on the wall so the room can watch eight o'clock arrive
• Dewey walks up the path with popcorn to a station full of ZSI vehicles
• Luther apologizes to Judy on the drive, drives to his parents' door instead of calling, and the night ends over four green mugs

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• ZSI Crisis Coordination Center — Rebuilt after Icener two levels under ZSI Headquarters; the holographic map, the white projected-release line above it, the video wall, the Lower Ring, and three folding chairs against the back wall
• Via Napoli — Alfresco patio on a side street in Savanna Central, the pack's table when the call comes; abandoned with the bread torn and unfinished (first appearance)
• Reptile Ravine — The weather wall station, in Tundratown; empty, locked, alarm panel screaming, until CTU cuts the door off its frame
• Station 118 — The bay, and the reinforced basement bunker added after Icener
• The Blue Bayou — Water's-edge restaurant in the Canal District where the McHerds are having dinner; a low room of lanterns and glass level with the water (first appearance)
• Deersneyland ferry terminal — On Deersborough Island; the 7:30 boat to Savanna Central does not come
• Zootopia Approach — The arrival sector, cleared to ATC ZERO
• Tundratown — Station One on its boundary with Sahara Square, the first junction on the trunk and the severance target
• City Hall — The hardened level beneath it, where the mayor is taken
• Vivian Wilde's garden — Reached by phone; the tomatoes are early this year
• 2901 Kilimanjaro Parkway — Luther's parents' house, at half past nine
• Pawthorne Mansion — The kitchen after midnight

Items

• Luther's binder — The annex he wrote for a weather-wall cascade, tabbed in colored markers with his block-letter penmanship on the first tab; kept beneath a console on the floor and run for real for the first time (first appearance)
• The two brass keys — Two-Person Integrity; on lanyards, in separate drawers with separate combinations, at consoles on opposite walls. Turned for the shelter-in-place alert and again for the corrective; inserted for the severance and never turned
• The security lockbox — Holds Judy's and Pawbert's phones from the arrest onward; Pawbert opens it at 7:55
• Stiles's crossword — Seven across, six letters, "persistent illusion," filled in at the stand-down
• The Green Sweater — Brought down after midnight and laid over the kitchen chair that faces the door
• Four Green Mugs — Down in their order: black coffee poured to the line, chamomile with the bag left in, honey, and Bonnie's green tea

End Credit Song

"In Whatever Time We Have" (From 'Children of Eden'), Mario Frangoulis & Stephen Schwartz

In Children of Eden this is the duet Japheth and Yonah sing on the eve of the flood, two lovers who know the world is ending and choose to spend what is left of it together. It is keyed to the whole hour, because that is the choice almost everyone in it makes. Nick calls his mother to hear her voice, Hen reaches Karen, Eddie's message to his son sits undelivered, Judy's shelter-in-place language sends the city home to hold its family, and Elizabeth McHerd turns down the seat that would survive the night to stay at her own table. The episode adds a turn the source lacks: the flood never comes, and whatever time they had turns out to be all of it, which the kitchen already knows when Pawbert asks and Luther answers with a single word.

Notes

• The whole episode is structured after 24 — one continuous hour told in timecoded blocks — and the CCC's staff are drawn from it: Bill Buchanan holds the Unit Chief chair Luther declined, Chloe O'Brian is the analyst who opens the second window nobody ordered, Nadia Yassir is the deputy holding a room she did not ask for, Edgar Stiles is on the monitoring desk, and the tactical element that breaches the Ravine station is CTU. TransZoo 520, the airliner sent around at ATC ZERO, is Flight 520 from 24's fifth day.
• The 38 minutes between the protected-positions order and the resume order are a reference to the 2018 Hawaii false ballistic-missile alert.
• The premise is Civilization's Nuclear Gandhi, gaming's most famous integer-underflow legend: the game's least aggressive leader has a rating so low that a modifier pushes it below zero, where it wraps to the maximum and the pacifist starts nuking people. Agnes De'Snake's plant at rest reads below the modern grid's floor and wraps to the top of the scale for the same reason.
• The two authorization codes are Disney animation in-jokes: A113 (Costa's "Alpha-one-one-three"), the CalArts classroom number hidden in every Pixar film and most Disney animation including the Zootopia films, and 2319 (the mayor's "Two-three-one-nine," which the TPI agent reads back as "niner"), the contamination emergency code from Monsters, Inc. (2001).
• Canter International is Gander International in Newfoundland, the airport of Operation Yellow Ribbon, and Canter Approach's frequency, 132.1, is Gander's real approach frequency.
• The three aircraft vectored out at ATC ZERO are Oceanic 815 (Lost), IG-99 spoken as Indeer-Golf-Niner-Niner (Elastigirl's jet in The Incredibles (2004)), and TransZoo 520 (24). ATC ZERO, the TFR and the NOTAM are real FAA terminology; ATC ZERO is the declaration used on September 11, 2001.
• Eddie's call to Christopher, who cannot hear him over the music in the club, is built on Lady Gaga's "Telephone" (2010).
• The pack's restaurant is Via Napoli in EPCOT's Italy pavilion, and its address, 200 Buena Vista Drive, is Walt Disney World's own; the McHerds' restaurant is Disneyland's Blue Bayou.
• Deersneyland's ferry-terminal vignette is a working parody of real park crisis operations, from the "Dreamers of all ages" announcement to the free churros.
• WebEOC is the real crisis information-management system used by emergency operations centers; the Mawtorola MCC dispatch console is a Motorola MCC 7500; "the Sivits" is SVTC, secure video teleconferencing; COOP, ICS, ESF-8, WEA and IPAWS, TPI, P25, BFT, IFF and USAR are all real emergency-management and public-safety systems.
• Harlan's greeting at the door, "A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one," is Palpatine's line from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999); Harlan means it sincerely.